Permeability paper is out!

It is out!!

After about 1 year of research and about another year of peer review, our paper on the permeability of cell membranes is finally out!

The full reference is in publications, here only a direct link using DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29272-x.

I won’t go into too much detail because the summary was already well written by Science Linx as How cells control their borders.

Here, I would love to share how an unexpected journey this was. We started with Jacopo on this project by measuring the permeability of lipid membranes trying to answer the question, why is the permeability so different for some species? Through a thorough systematic research combining both experimental and theoretical approaches, we have made progress and suprised ourselves with the fundamental result we obtained.

The yeast plasma membrane must be in a very rigid state highly similar to the gel phase known from model lipid membranes.

In the beginning, I would think that such a thing must be already known and well described for decades as permeability of cell membranes is their very fundamental property—that is why membranes are ther in the first place!

Clearly, there are still some areas in research, which yield unexpected discoveries of very fundamental character. Challenging the assumptions about the structure of the cell membranes was a key step in our discovery.

And, this is the first paper I have with a real knight! 😁